Footprints: Designing Tropical Retreats

Category: Concept, Design
Register by: September 5, 2020
Submit by: September 22, 2020

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Premise

With an increase in global mobility, travel is no longer seen as a luxury and has grown to become easily available and accessible to a larger part of the population. Numbers recorded 25 million tourist arrivals in 1950 (globally). In 2018 this number read 1.4 billion international arrivals per year.

As one of the world’s fastest-growing industries, tourism is an increasingly important source of employment for many countries. Employing over 200 million people worldwide, it is one of the top three contributors to economic development, and a primary source of foreign exchange, employment, and cash.

However, global impacts of climate change, coastal urbanization, biodiversity loss, fossil fuel consumption, disease transmission, and cultural commoditization, were and still are among the more contentious tourism issues in media.

Looking for pristine scenery and exotic cultures, the number of tourists wanting to explore protected areas and rural communities are continuing to rise. Tropical regions record the biggest growth. As extremely important habitats these regions often are the last refuge to many endangered species. The tiniest bit of uncontrolled disturbance can have potentially disastrous consequences.

Challenge

While tourism no doubt plays a vital role in global and local economies, it also has an ever-lasting impact on the global and local environments as well.

How do we adapt the concept of sustainability to the design of the built environment? How do we create and manage a healthy built environment based on ecological and resource-efficient principles? How do we try to limit the impact of the built environment on its surroundings?

Develop a solution for a tropical Eco- Resort, with the ultimate goal of restricting the impact of the built form to an absolute minimum.

Site

China’s only tropical province, Hainan has grown to be the largest Special Economic Zone and the most frequented tourist destination in the country, however, the region’s GDP makes it the fourth smallest economy in the world. Showing unprecedented growth since the economic reforms of 1978, Hainan is seeing a subsequent downturn and has embarked on an ‘eco-province plan’ that focuses on reducing unwarranted damage to the environment in the face of development.

On the other hand, targets have been set to expand its international tourism sector, working towards an underlying goal of hosting two million foreign tourists by 2020.

Located at the junction of Nanbianhai Road and Buying Road, the site is in close proximity to the Nanban Hai Fishing Village and the Sanya Port; at the heart of Sanya, peaceful, laid back and desperately clinging on to the charms of a bygone era.

Objective

The following objectives can be a point of beginning to conceive this design. Participants can assume their own contexts and users before initiating their design process.

Context: Solution relies on locally available resources, on the immediate environment and on identifiable needs.
Form and Materiality: Apply form and materiality that is culturally and climatically appropriate even if unconventional.
Balance: Environmental, economic and social sustainability.
Low Impact: Environmental, economic and social sustainability.

Prizes